19 August 2008

Stop worrying about craft and seek the purpose of design, says Nick Bell

Despite being a British graphic designer (a species branded as ‘excessively mean’ by the editor of another design magazine) I really wanted to give a Black (gold) Pencil to some fellow (non-British) designers when I sat on the Book Design jury for the D&AD [Design and Art Direction] Awards earlier this year.

8 August 2008

Great British Editorial (Barcelona: Index Book, €40), writes Simon Esterson, is a simple idea carried off with confidence: ask lots of studios to send in work, photograph the envelopes it comes in to make the opening spread of each section, and then place the projects as simply as possible on the pages . . . all 648 of them.

7 August 2008

In Eye no. 67, Steven Heller reviewed Paper Tigers (Chronicle) the Cushing and Tompkins book about Chinese posters from 1966-76, the period known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. You can read his review here, and see below for some images we didn’t have room to show in the published issue.

5 August 2008

The Táin demonstrates how design can contribute to a nation’s sense of itself

Graphic design heroes might be, as Martha Scotford noted, Western white men, but they’re a particular kind of Western, white, man: there are few Finns, Greeks or Irish in the canon. As a 1992 article in Graphis asked: ‘Where are the Paul O’Rands, the Milton McGlasers?’

4 August 2008

Jacqueline Casey: the foremost US practitioner of the International Style

By selecting Jacqueline Casey as her most underappreciated graphic designer in Eye’s ‘Beyond the canon’ issue (‘Woman at the edge of technology’), Elizabeth Resnick gave a shout-out to my own candidate, writes Kenneth FitzGerald.